Combat System

Combat in The Relic: First Guardian is built around a deliberate inversion of the usual stamina economy. Attacking costs nothing, so aggression is never rationed; the stamina gauge exists purely for defence. The developers describe the goal as freedom in attack and intensity in survival.

The Core Rules

Because attacks are free and defence is expensive, the decision that matters is when to spend stamina, not when to attack. Committing a dodge or block at the wrong moment leaves you without the resource when it counts, which is what gives the game its balance of action and vulnerability.

Skills and Weapon Mastery

Skills are equipped onto a chosen weapon using relic energy, so the weapon you carry determines the abilities you can bring. The twelve skill trees supply active abilities and spectacular ultimates, while Relics modify how those skills behave, reshaping function rather than just raising numbers. Encounters are designed to reward dodge, parry, and weapon mastery rather than raw statistics.

A distinct combat mode governs what the Guardian can do while a fight is live. It was restrictive at launch, and Patch 12 opened it up so that field page interactions stay available while combat mode is active, meaning lore can be picked up without disengaging first.

Fighting the Brutals

Combat builds toward the brutals, the game's up to 80 bosses. No two fight alike, and the developers are explicit that a strategy which beats one offers no guarantee against the next, so adapting per encounter is the expected skill rather than settling into one rhythm.

Changes Since Launch

Combat has been tuned repeatedly since release. The parry timing window was extended for smoother play, base defence for the player character was raised by 30, and skill attack ranges were adjusted. Two-handed weapon skills received both a speed increase and later bug fixes, including a case where chaining a specific skill after a two-handed skill failed to fire the second. Targeting could previously cause in-place movement glitches, which has been resolved, and monster attack damage and animation timing have been rebalanced. Patch 7 changed how dodging works while locked on: the dodge now travels relative to the camera view rather than the direction the character is facing, which makes evasive movement behave the way most players expect during a boss fight. Dagger skills that refused to reactivate once their cooldown expired were fixed in the same patch, and Patch 11 resolved a case where repeated enemy re-initialisation left monsters permanently invulnerable. The Updates and Patches page lists each change.

The most disruptive change was structural rather than numeric. Patch 14 reworked the internal input handling behind attack, guard, dodge, movement and skills, and in the same update moved the gamepad dodge from the bottom face button to the right face button. It was short-lived: Patch 15 on 27 August 2026 reverted the gamepad and keyboard input settings to their previous stable state to resolve input issues, without listing the individual bindings. The Stamina and Dodging page covers what that means for defensive play.

Later patches went after defensive consistency in specific fights. Patch 15 fixed players reviving in a guard stance if they died while guarding, and Patch 16 fixed the guard animation persisting after a respawn. In the Harlan encounter, hits two to five of Volgar's Skill04 were wrongly flagged as unblockable until Patch 16. Patch 17 fixed Igwis attacks that could not be parried properly and turned some previously unparryable Stenor attacks into parryable ones. Patches 17 and 18 also cut back field enemy density and removed unfairly placed explosive barrels; the Enemies page covers those changes.